MY SONG IS FOR ALL MEN

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: january 2021 :: RMTnews 22 Peter Blackman was a highly educated, multi-lingual classically trained priest turned communist poet who after the Second World War became a railway fitter first at the Roundhouse in Camden then at Willesden Junction depot. As an active member of the National Union Railwaymen, he was a highly respected work colleague who always took time in his quiet way to use his education in the service of his workmates that struggled with literacy and letter writing. In his life he had joined the Communist Party during the heady days of the anti-fascist Popular Front, built Wellington bombers in the war effort and, fluent in French, travelled regularly to Paris to write for Le Monde and other influential publications. In 1949 he organised a tour of the Soviet Union for his friend Paul Robeson and travelled with him to Moscow and Warsaw. He was a highly literate man but found it hard to get his work published, in fact the poet never had a collection published in his lifetime. In 1952, Lawrence and Wishart did publish his long narrative poem My Song is for all Men and extracts from the poem, whose many references include Belsen, the US war on Korea and South African apartheid, were incorporated in the Alan Bush cantata, Voices of the Prophets alongside the words of William Blake and John Milton. Yet, as the Cold War closed in, it crushed much cultural output and, as a result, he was largely forgotten in Britain as well as in his native Caribbean. And so the extraordinary story of this highly cultured and unassuming polymath may well have been lost to the world but for the curiosity of a young teacher Chris Searle who came across Blackman’s poetry and visited him in his flat in Belsize Park in the 1970s. Searle, who still writes on cultural matters in the Morning Star newspaper to this day, invited him to recite his poetry to his students in the East End of London and elsewhere which eventually brought him to the attention of ex-Soft Machine drummer and communist Robert Wyatt. Wyatt offered Blackman to recite his majestic anti-fascist poem Stalingrad as the closing track on his seminal political album ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ released in 1982. Today, of course, Blackman can be heard reciting his opus on YouTube within just a few clicks and it is well worth taking the time to do so. Beautifully delivered in cut glass classical English tones, Stalingrad was his devastating tribute to the courage of those who defeated the Nazi war machine and gave hope to the world after the long night of fascism had descended on the world. Blackman also showed Searle some of his unpublished work, including Joseph, which was written in the late 1950s against the backdrop of the US civil rights movement. It is included in the collection with three other long poems and a short elegy to his friend the black communist activist and Notting Hill carnival founder Claudia Jones. ‘MY SONG IS FOR ALL MEN’ NUR member and radical black poet Peter Blackman was the only member of his union branch who could speak Latin and Greek Peter Blackman (1909-1993)